Tag Archives: Jesus

Moving Mountains

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I have a hunch that when we get to Heaven we will realize that no matter how big, how wild, how impossible our prayers have been, we could have prayed for more.

Let me be clear: God does not answer prayers for evil. He does not reward our sin, cowardice, or avarice. He rewards the just, but if we pray along the lines of love, mountains do move.

Have you ever seen a mountain move? Have ever seen it lumber to the sea and toss itself in?

I have not. And as with these oh-so-solid mountains, many of the big-ticket items I have prayed for have been stolidly immobile for years.

Impossible things.

But I do worship the God of impossible things. His wry sense of humor, His unflagging love, His ridiculous, tenacious prophets, and His remarkable creation all suggest

Moving mountains ain’t no thing

For Him.

Veronica

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When I lost Veronica–as I was losing Veronica, I decided I had to leave a trail of words so she could find me. This was back before the bloom of social media, so the trail of words was newspaper and legal-document based with a book of some sort when she grew up.

If anyone asked me, I would say that loving Veronica and having to figure out how to survive without her was the single most defining tragedy of my life. Defining in that it changed me. Defining in that it may have made me a better person.

The days and the hours right after I lost you were hell–actual hell. I wanted to die it hurt so much. I missed you, but worse than that I knew you missed me. I hated not being able to tell you why I was not there–that it had not at all been my choice to let you go.

This forced me to pray in a way I had never prayed before. I prayed for people to stroke your hair and people to sing you lullabies. I prayed for people to do things to love you, because I could not.

And in the process I realized that this kind of prayer was a form of metaphysical bargaining–God send someone to love Veronica led to God saying who will you love in return?

I loved youth group kids for you

I loved refugees for you

I loved drug addicts and the mentally ill for you

The snooty

The cowardly

And the messy

For you

I loved strangers for you

I loved pilgrims for you.

And the people who worked the drive through….for years they all were you–my lost baby in the world.

Because for the last 20 years all I have seen around me are would-be Veronicas.

Because that is how God sees me. He sees me through Jesus, His beloved lost Son.

So when you are afraid to call, when I have no address to send birthday gifts or plane tickets I marvel at what you don’t know about the treasure of love I have for you,

my baby girl.

Even So

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I struggle with sadness (with good reason). The world is a dark place. Sometimes I will construct bits of words to hold off the sadness, things that are true but cannot fly or sing or curl up in one’s hands. We make words alive all the time–alive to life or alive to death, but not everyone can use words to make the dead rise or the sun, to speak worlds into being.

I know only One who can do that. Word of God, speak us all to life.

Nothing Wasted

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Scientists (at least the social ones) love to navel gaze at the belly buttons of the religious.

I get it. We are a messy, heterogeneous bunch. As I get older I get less and less religious but more and more convinced in the power of the God of Love.

Take this week for instance. This week we threw our all at trying to save a litter of kittens from panleukopenia.

Wrenching.

When my children poured out their grief in each loss they said, I just want them to know that I love them. I just want her to know I love her. I just want him to know I love him. Or directly to the dead–

I just want you to know I love you.

When you believe in a compassionate, omnipotent God, getting love notes to kittens is no biggie. He keeps what we have committed to Him against that Day.

Even if the day is Friday.

Even if you thought the last one might make it through.

Even if the patient weighs less than a pound.

Impending demise might make some pragmatic, other it pushes on to say, no matter what

I love you

On earth as it is in heaven.

A Letter to “Family,”

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I was born into a traveling family. Growing up I struggled with issues of identity and loss. What was home? What was this nagging sense of displacement?

I remember traveling in Italy as a young child and looking for the face of my grandmother in the crowd–despite my knowledge that she was not there. There was no chance that my middle-aged grandmother had jetted off for a Roman holiday in the spring of 1977

I had family members who I loved who did and said and believed things I did not. I found their beliefs deeply painful. How could I love them but not their way of seeing the world?

I settled on loving them but not the faults in their world views, and uneasy, precarious compromise, and one I have not much improved upon in all the years since.I struggle with disappointment in the collective institution of “family,” just as I have with “church,” “friendship,” “community,” and “club.”

People fail each other in big and little ways all the time, but Jesus never does. He is this extraordinary voice for justice, for love, for honor, for hope. His family resemblance marks the best of us.

Jesus does not look like a white guy in a flowing robe. He does not look like any of the famous pictures we have of him.

What he looks like is Love. Love that protects. Love that shelters. Love that never fails.

And that kind of family resemblance is hard to miss…when we find it among us in this broken world.

Matthew 12:48-50

1 Corinthians 13

The Women in the Story

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Matthew 1:3,5-6 NIV

[3] Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, [5] Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, [6] and Jesse the father of King David. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,

It can be tempting to ask why all their names are not there.

It can be tempting to ask why Uriah never got a son, or why Judah was such a freaking loser but still got to be on the list.

But they are there–the prostitutes, the good girls, the chronically misunderstood. Most of them anyway, because the God of Sarah, Leah, and Mary told the Israelites keep all the babies, they all matter to Me.

One

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Matthew 1:1 NIV

[1] This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham:

Matthew seems pretty confident that Jesus is the Messiah, a word with so much power to reckon with us and all that has captured us that I am not sure how big or long or loud our explanations of Messiah could be and still be only an approximation of the real.

Some synonyms: King, Anointed, Savior, Redeemer, Ransomer, Hero, Deliverer, Protector

The Reckoner.